De Blasio Takes Office Citing Wealth Gap as Crime Falls

New York's 109th Mayor Bill de Blasio walks onto stage at City Hall in New York on Jan. 1, 2014. Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Jan. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Bill de Blasio assumed office as New
York’s 109th mayor today, sworn in by former President Bill
Clinton at a ceremony attended by thousands who heard him vow to
dedicate his government to improving life for the least
fortunate.

De Blasio, 52, officially took the oath of office at
midnight before hundreds of supporters outside his Brooklyn
home. At the afternoon event on the steps of City Hall in lower
Manhattan, the first Democrat to run New York in 20 years
renewed his proposal to tax the wealthy to pay for universal
pre-kindergarten classes and after-school programs, a levy that
would require state approval in an election year.

“We are called to put an end to economic and social
inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love,” de
Blasio said in his 18-minute address. “And so today, we commit
to a new progressive direction in New York. And that same
progressive impulse has written our city’s history. It’s in our
DNA.”

De Blasio’s egalitarian themes have already captured
national attention. President Barack Obama invited him and other
newly elected mayors to a White House meeting last month to
focus on job creation and economic fairness, and he emerged from
the 90-minute session as the main spokesman for the group.
Democrats will run the 12 biggest U.S. cities this year.

Sick Leave

“He’s part of a surge nationally among Democrats to shift
policy away from fiscal austerity to an expansion of the social
safety net and better-paying jobs,” said Robert Shapiro, a
professor and former chairman of the political science
department at Columbia University in Manhattan. “People are
looking to the cities for solutions to these problems.”

De Blasio pledged in his speech to push for a law extending
paid sick leave to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers working
in small businesses, require “big developers” to build more
affordable housing and expand community health services.

Consistent with pursuing economic opportunity, de Blasio
set aside 1,000 free tickets for the public for the ceremonial
swearing-in. He intends to host an open house Jan. 5 from noon
to 5 p.m. at Gracie Mansion, the official mayoral residence on
the Upper East Side. Those wishing to attend signed up on the
Internet.

‘Shared Responsibility’

Clinton attended the ceremony with his wife, Hillary Rodham
Clinton, the former U.S. Secretary of State and a possible 2016
presidential candidate. De Blasio worked in the Clinton
administration as a regional director of Housing and Urban
Development and managed Hillary Clinton’s successful 2000
campaign for U.S. senator from New York.

“I strongly endorse Bill de Blasio’s core campaign
commitment that we have to have a city of shared opportunities,
shared prosperity, shared responsibility,” the former president
told the gathering, which included Governor Andrew Cuomo, U.S.
Senator Charles Schumer, former Mayor David Dinkins and
entertainers including Harry Belafonte, Susan Sarandon, Steve
Buscemi, Cynthia Nixon and Rosie Perez.

Economic inequality, Clinton said, “bedevils the entire
country and I can tell you from my work, much of the world.”

De Blasio won election in November focusing on inequality
of wealth to an electorate that in past years voted for mayors
who focused on fiscal restraint and crime control.

Bloomberg Era

Those political issues receded as his predecessor, former
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, presided over a resurgent city where
crime rates were brought to historic lows; the $72.7 billion
budget was balanced; jobs reached an all-time high and a record
54 million tourists pumped money into the economy last year.
Homicides have declined by almost 50 percent since Bloomberg
became mayor in 2002, and a total of 333 last year through Dec.
29 is 20 percent below the record low set in 2012.

“He has committed so much of his life to this city,”
Clinton said of 12 years served by Bloomberg, who also attended
the ceremony. “He leaves the city stronger and healthier than
he found it.”

The occasion also included the swearing-in of former
Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, 53, as city
comptroller, and former City Councilmember Letitia James, 51, as
citywide public advocate.

Tax Increase

De Blasio’s plan to finance early childhood and adolescent
after-school programs hinges on the Legislature and governor
permitting the city to increase taxes on income above $500,000
to 4.4 percent from almost 3.9 percent. For the 27,300 city
taxpayers earning $500,000 to $1 million, the average increase
would be $973 a year, according to the Independent Budget
Office, a municipal agency.

“There’s no doubt that it’s the right idea and it’s where
we want to go,” Cuomo told reporters before marching up
Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in the Nov. 11 Veterans Day Parade. Yet
in an election year the governor has not said he would support
de Blasio’s proposed tax increase, even though it’s limited to
five years, and would only apply to the city’s wealthiest
residents.

“That’s less than three bucks a day -- about the cost of a
small soy latte at your local Starbucks,” de Blasio said today
of the plan. “We do not ask more of the wealthy to punish
success; we do it to create more success stories.”

Fewer Incentives

De Blasio has called for fewer city tax incentives to
attract or retain large corporations in favor of more investment
in small businesses. He’s also advocated spending more on the
City University of New York for scholarships and work-force
training.

In a City Council with 48 Democrats among its 51 members,
de Blasio may count on support for his agenda, including a
resolution asking the state legislature to enact the tax
increase. De Blasio defeated Republican Joseph Lhota in the
mayoral race by 49 percentage points, the widest victory margin
by a non-incumbent in city history.

In de Blasio, New York voters chose a Cambridge,
Massachusetts-bred Boston Red Sox fan who arrived in the city as
a New York University undergraduate. He received a master’s
degree in international relations from Columbia University. He
then worked for a Catholic relief organization, for which he
distributed food and medicine on a 10-day trip to Nicaragua.

De Blasio’s career in city politics began as an aide to
Dinkins, the city’s first and only black mayor, in 1990. He
first won election as a Brooklyn school board member in 1999,
and served two terms as City Councilman from 2002 to 2009, where
he focused on child abuse and the homeless as chairman of its
general welfare committee, before getting elected to the
citywide watchdog post of public advocate in 2009.

Bratton Hired

De Blasio’s first major personnel decision was the Dec. 5
appointment of William Bratton, 66, as police commissioner, a
job he held for two years until he resigned in 1996 after a
falling-out with Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Bratton’s 27-month stint heading the police department
began a 20-year period in which crime dropped 74 percent. The
new commissioner takes over a 34,000-officer department and must
prove he can continue to reduce crime while refining stop-and-frisk street tactics that de Blasio campaigned against, saying
they targeted blacks and Latinos disproportionately and damaged
police-community relations.

De Blasio said Dec. 30 that he would drop the city’s appeal
of a federal court decision finding that the stop-and-frisk
practice violated the Constitution.

Bratton also will run a 1,000-officer division devoted to
terrorism investigations and prevention that’s been criticized
for its surveillance of Muslims. De Blasio has vowed to curtail
the practice.

Baseball Stadiums

Bloomberg’s three terms included zoning changes that
stimulated investment to build offices, apartment towers and
parks on underused waterfronts; new baseball stadiums in Queens
and the Bronx; and an arena that brought professional basketball
to Brooklyn. He closed multibillion dollar budget gaps in the
recession that coincided with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and
after the 2008 financial crisis.

The city is on pace to reach a record 4 million total jobs
in 2013, the mayor said last month. He is the founder and
majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.

Under Bloomberg, the city’s credit rating was raised three
times, to Aa2, third-highest, by Moody’s Investors Service. As
the change in administrations approached, investors on Dec. 17
accepted less extra yield on some New York general-obligation
bonds compared with benchmark municipals with similar maturity.
A security maturing August 2024 traded with an average spread of
about 0.45 percentage point, compared with a 0.47 percentage-point when the bonds priced Dec. 12, data compiled by Bloomberg
show.

Poverty Level

De Blasio’s task, as he describes it, will be to focus on
improving the lives of the 46 percent of New Yorkers with
incomes at or below 150 percent of the city’s poverty level, or
$46,000 for a four-person household in 2011. He seeks more
income distribution in a city where the richest 1 percent took
home 39 percent of all earnings in 2012, up from 12 percent in
1980, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute, a New York-based
research group.

De Blasio’s also vowed to create 200,000 units of below-market “affordable housing” in the next 10 years, partly by
using a $1 billion investment from city pension funds. On Dec.
23, he appointed Alicia Glen, the head of urban investment for
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., as deputy mayor for housing and
economic development to work out low-cost financing for the
construction.

Albany Reception

De Blasio’s election means that besides New York, there
will be Democratic mayors next year in Los Angeles; Chicago;
Houston; Philadelphia; Phoenix; San Antonio; Dallas; San Jose,
California; Austin, Texas; and Jacksonville, Florida.

In some of those states, the legislatures are controlled by
Republicans. As a result, when Democrats and mayors advocated
issues such as higher taxes to support education and expanding
Medicaid under Obama’s health-care overhaul, Republicans blocked
them.

De Blasio may find a more receptive audience in Albany,
where the Assembly is controlled by Democrats and the Senate by
Republicans and a breakaway group of Democrats. Also, de Blasio
has known Cuomo for more than 20 years, and de Blasio worked for
him in 1997 and 1998 when Cuomo served in Clinton’s cabinet as
housing secretary.

“We started as young guys many wrinkles and many gray
hairs ago, and we shared the good times and we shared the bad
times,” Cuomo, 55, said Sept. 16 at City Hall. “I’ve had a
long experience with Bill; I’ve watched him personally grow,
know what he believes. I know his agenda, and I think it will
work very well.”